as long as we're on the topic

This is for taithe's amusement, but the rest of you are welcome to join in. Just imagine that the older half of the conversation is speaking in a coastal Mississippi accent. If you're not sure what that is, think something close to Holly Hunter's (Georgia) accent, but slower, and farther back in the throat. It's really a rather gentle accent, and for all that we fuss about non-Southerners thinking Southern accent means stupid, the Delta/coastal accent has definite connotations of elegance, if a friendly kind.

Anyway, in talking of the Civil War and Reconstruction, I was reminded of one of the few family stories that... well, it remains a mystery. My grandmother was, as befit many Southern women of her era, big into genealogy. Come to think of it, it's still a big thing, but we've got that whole thing about family, anyway. I grew up with stories of various people in the family, like the time she told me I had a however-many-greats-aunt who was -- drumroll, please -- Abraham Lincoln's stepmother.

Me, at tender age of ten: wasn't the reason Abraham Lincoln left home really young because he hated his step-mother?
Gramma: *handwave* Dear, we don't speak ill of the dead.

[ETA: many many thanks to wordweaverlynn (see comments) for enlightening me on this childhood misunderstanding, that childhood-me had it Completely Wrong. Wah!]

Anyway, the only other Civil-War related story of unexpected relatives was about a Southern General. When the South decided to secede from the Union, all ranking military officers who were residents of a seceding state were contacted by the newly-formed Confederacy. Each general was asked to convert his commission from the North/Federal govt to the South/Confederacy. Many didn't, many did. And then there was one general -- the one in my family -- who regretfully replied that he had -- really! -- only just discovered, like, within minutes of getting the invitational letter -- that he had inherited some form of madness.

Terrible, terrible thing, them late-in-life unexpected insanities. Kill you right off, if you weren't careful. Naturally, he had to listen to his doctors' advice, and promptly packed up his entire family and off they all go to a sanatorium in the South of France in hopes he might live out that what's left of his life, in peace. And, y'know, hope for a cure.

Me: What happened then, Gramma?
Gramma: Remarkably, he was only ill for foueeah yeeaahrs, and the sanatorium cured him completely, just in time for him to return home, on the tails of the South surrendering.
Me: ...
Gramma: *completely deadpan* The nick of time, really.
Me: That seems awfully convenient timing, Gramma.
Gramma: Gracious, I'm sure it was just a coincidence.
Me: Unh-hunh. So what was his name? Who was he?
Gramma: *handwave* Dear, it's not polite to speak ill of the dead.

(Like she didn't do it all the time. She just figured if she didn't name names, it wasn't really speaking ill of the dead because you hadn't said who exactly they were. At least, that's what I think she was thinking. She never did explain why not, only that... well, she had plenty to say about plenty in the family. Now I've got plenty of stories and no names to go with them. Except for the stories about my grandmother's step-grandfather's younger brother, who -- according to my mother -- really did run that wild. Not like running wild was all that much, considering my grandmother's aunt ran a boarding house, threw parties where the bathtub really was filled with gin, and had three pet house-pigs.)

I guess this just means temporary insanity runs in my family, or maybe -- to not speak ill of the dead -- just really good survival instincts.

fears of a wankish world

Recently, sevilemar left a comment on the posts I did on the dynamics of fandom. One part of the comment leapt out at me:

I think preserving earlier posts (or texts) and naming your sources like you did with obsession_inc's post are tremendously helpful when a reader wants to know more about the thing discussed. It creates a sense of tradition, and tradition is a tool of organization ... Also, earlier posts, texts and discussions can be used to demonstrate patterns or recurring themes, structures etc. if one is so inclined.

All very true, and the internet-casual "I was reading __ and it made me think of __" or the more direct, "this is in response to __'s post on __" definitely act as shorthand citations. I await the day when we develop a pattern, or an assumption of, inline notations (journalname, 2010). Unlike the footnotes and endnotes in printed text -- highly annoying, if you ask me, because of the requirement of skipping to the end of the book and searching minuscule text for that one line, only to have it say ibid (and who the hell is ibid anyway and can I shoot him now?) -- but I digress.

What that comment-bit actually made me think of was this: there have been times, many more times than I think I'd even like to admit, where I have not linked to, nor identified, who or what prompted the post. And that's because of one reason: because the text can be searched, found, and wanked.

As I've discussed before, discussions are digressive in their organic form, going this way, and back again. When I was in college, it would be a handful or so of us, at the local bar, covering all the permutations of a topic. Between us, we'd move from here, to there, and back again, sometimes arguing against ourselves as a way to make sure we'd left no conversational stone unturned. (Yes, it's called Being A Philosophy Major.) In the internet discussions, past and current, it's the same thing, except multiple voices are doing that digression, all at the same time. Hyper, I'll give you hyper -- compared to the rather languid pace of pre-internet.

However, that overlapping means the digression may no longer be organic, but cacophonous. The various link-roundups and link-spams on any given hot topic definitely give the impression of chaos, and someone out there is gonna want to force it into Proper Order. The link-roundups and link-spams (especially when accompanied by editorial commentary such as "privilege in comments" or "triggers for __") act as forces of order against a chaotic, near-post-modern discussion frenzy. And where you have the drive for organization, for order, you're going to have to determine what's in, and what's out, and as I've mentioned before, that's where you get the Proper Order's private wish that everyone would speak in turn, because all this talking out of turn is giving some folks the chance to derail -- or just digress, which is sometimes bad enough anyway -- and that, we just can't have.

Hence, wank -- and wank, when you think about it, is pretty damn meta in a bizarre way. A lot of the worst wank in the various fails isn't always only and entirely because someone was privileged; that's usually just the starting-point. The rest of the wank is wank over whether or not that critical-post was wank: in this chaotic crazy everyone-talks-at-once discussion, it's pretty much inevitable in that any decent-sized fail, there'll be an argument over the unspoken community rules of how one goes about having an argument.

Citing any of that, linking to any of that -- no matter how thought-provoking -- means getting dragged into it. Internet discussions as the ultimate tarbaby: you link, you are connected, you can be found, and your citation can be used against you. While this would be true regardless of whether link-roundups existed -- no matter how useful, overall, as historical records of a discussion's progress -- a link-roundup still creates an easy path for others to follow to your door, and thence to holler at you.

While I'm certainly not going to advocate Civility Lessons for everyone -- there are still people writing in all-caps, for crying out loud, and such advocacy would just be another opportunity for wank, anyway -- I do think that any metatastic discussions of internet conversations must take into account the pressures created by those link round-ups and their very public dispersal. From an academic or historical point, couldn't this potentially warp one's perception of a discussion, in one direction or another, if many are speaking but only in an undertone, unlinked? Or many are speaking but with self-censored neutrality when linking?

If fear of wank -- public shaming, really -- overrides the OP's investment in the actual topic, how do you know you've actually collected the discussion? What if your introduction is an unlinked post, giving the impression it starts and stops here, what does that do to how we see the post? Is a post more valuable -- or more credible -- if it risks the wank by linking? Or is it more valuable (to those within its discussion-borders) if its unlinked state means it's a safe space for the conversation-participants? Wouldn't that, in turn, make it as valuable and valid as any public, wank-risking posts, if for different reasons?


Sometimes I hate my brain.